edmonton AB 2012

edmonton AB 2012
week 3 (February 20th till 24th
with Stefano Muneroni in Edmonton-Canada)
 
day 1
 
Starting point. Miranda’s exercise of discovering the space.
A space of confusion, both visually and acoustically; with a lot of blurred information at the edges; a lot of layers on top of each other; different colours; different sounds; wind playing with fabric; the reflection of the sun on cars passing by. The inside reflects the outside.
Four circles of increasing complexity. The smallest, inner circle: just a horizontal line; the horizon?; the border, the edge. The second circle: a human figure and the letter A – the beginning of mankind? The third circle: a cross under a bridge or a mountain – our destiny? The fourth circle: three almost parallel lines, a crowd next to a house on legs – three always know more than one and this room has legs, is fluid like all the rivers we visited.
A line of circles. A circle of lines. Breaking the symmetry of the framing.
I am curious now how it will sound but I decide to wait for the moment to arrive later, when this will reveal itself as part of a larger story, our story.
Let’s talk!
 
day 2
 
Important themes that came back yesterday:
  • Space
  • Layering
  • Spatial layering
  • Orientation
  • Framing
Strongest experience during the practice: How the writing always seems to create more ‘distance’; takes away some part of ‘my presence’ towards the space, the others. This is for me the greatest challenge/goal of this new episode of ‘rewriting distance’: how to access the writing with the same kind of presence as the witnessing or the performing.
To go back to the keywords. The most inclusive one seems to be this notion of ‘spatial layering’ through the positioning of the bodies in space and towards each other:
  • In the inner circle: the performer(s) who articulate, physically and verbally;
  • At the edges of this circle: the witness who grounds and orientates the experience both for the performers and the audience – the witness as primary inter-face who remains a silent, somatic presence.
  • Yesterday we started to experiment with a new layer – the spectator/writer who watches the interaction between performer and witness and frames it through his/her writing. To experience, to understand and to integrate the writing in this position in such a way that it keeps both tuned in to the presence; adds another layer that orientates but also opens new interpretations.
  • The outer circle: a real audience. Stefano’s primary question: where do we image the audience in space?
A relevant quote I found last night in my reading, about contextualizing poems:
“We don’t need  more than the tiniest amount of framing, but I think even this small amount of context is key because it helps with the orienting response that is fundamental to human brains. The orienting response originates in the brain stem, where a cluster of ancient systems evolved to make an animal pay attention to significant aspects of its environment.” (Alice Major, Intersecting Sets, p. 89)
Side remark: the importance of windows and doors for the practice: the relationship between inside and outside; another set of spatial layers – the city, the room, the body.
Shusterman’s notion of representational (trying to objectify) versus experiential ( subjective, proprioceptive) somaesthetics.
Stefano:
Word as anchorage.
The failure of objectivity versus to embrace ambiguity.
Derrida’s interval
Third space. In-between.
Importance of difference.
Importance of listening.
Lin:
The edges of the space.
Building on something small.
Paying attention to the space as a way to discover each other.
To navigate.
My voice is home.
 
The reading as yet another layer. The consciousness of your own voice as you read, even silently. The story of Lin’s father going blind.
The importance of ‘shape’.
Stefano’s fear that words objectify; impose a meaning on the movement. The word also has ambiguity and adds more possibilities. Meaning is relational.
The moment you move from one track to another you are in a liminal space.
 
day 3
 
I start my writing with the last note I made yesterday – with Lin’s comment about the ‘liminal spaces’ we find ourselves in when we move from one spatial position to another – from witness to performer to writer to spectator, and back to witness – and from one track of articulation to another – from writing to moving to voicing and back to writing.
It feels that it is especially in these liminal spaces that I re-member, i.e. that I take elements of the ‘narratives’ offered by the others, which trigger of my own memories and narratives which I deconstruct and reconstruct; take apart physically and re-member.
(note: to reread the essay on Isis and Osiris in Remembering the Body)
Lin’s sock and her counting on her fingers the numerous things her mother knitted for her, resonating in Stefano’s story of an unfinished sock and my memory of Tante Linneke all coming together in the humming which expresses without referencing.
The switching of tracks/positions creates a particular punctuation like the many dots … that punctuate the writing: the in-between, the silence, the pause, the hesitation, the non-beat.
It is the non-beat that determines the rhythm. It is where we create liminal space and time for the others to fill in, to take over, … The dots are the invitation in the Peircean sense for the signs we hum to be picked up and responded to.
The notion of palimpsest – the spatial layering on top of each other is the result of a particular chronology which gets blurred in the act of reading. Is that what we do? To read the historical layers of the space we are in and blur them with our personal memories and narratives?
(memo: to write about scars and graffiti)
Stefano:
  • Memory construction.
  • Our perception being influenced by our own narrative. Do I always see what I want to see?
  • Are true epiphanies possible?
  • The space is moody.
Lin:
  • A yarn is a story.
  • Imprints
  • Lines shaped by the outline of a body. What are the bodies inside the shape of letters?
  • Erasing
  • Shadows that mumble.
  • The function of the drone in South-Asian music.
  •  
day 4
 
For me the ultimate purpose of the practice is how to embody knowledge and the articulation that results from it, also in writing.
A lot of the writing I read, especially the academic one, doesn’t feel embodied. It feels like an accumulation of words – a word-fall – without a source and without an estuary – no river feeding it. Like a postcard of the site or experience rather than the experience itself.
I want to offer people through my writing a sense of the original experience. I want to touch them, physically and emotionally. Maybe this implies that the writing has to simplify again on the semantic level – no longer needing to be clever in its wording. Maybe this implies to stay close to a descriptive, experiential mode rather than going into an analytic one.
My best writing always had this quality and as Stefano indicated yesterday, it is always addressed to a particular you: my grandfather just before he died; Filip and Steven, my sons when I felt I could send them into the world on their own, letting them go, thrusting what I passed on to them; my lovers in particular Stephanie, whose energy is so soothing and compatible with mine; … The readers of my essays only started to respond to them when I allowed myself to be autobiographical, to talk about live experiences, … my body,…
‘To be floored’. Reminding me of Floor, my talented BA student in choreography who writes the most amazing letters to her body.
“Dear body,…”
“I am my body”
My body translates the world, the environment, the others metaphorically.
Stefano: on incertitude!
 
day 5
 
This feels like a new beginning.  A zero point from which to advance, to build on, … to actually re-write the experiences of the past week, not by remembering them, but by trying to experience their physical residue in the presence of the act of writing.
What I start to experience most, throughout the week, that in order to write, I have to find a particular rhythm where hand/pen and mind/thoughts are synchronized like when Lin and Stefano synchronized their movements.
Every sentence has its own breath. And the punctuation defines the rhythm. Or does the rhythm defines the punctuation?
Questions we asked ourselves this week:
  • How do we keep the writing alive, similar to the movement?
  • How do we re-member past, present and future?
  • How do we articulate the space?
  • How do we navigate the different tracks of our articulation? Moving, speaking, writing.
  • How do we relate to each other? Individual narratives and memories as building blocks for a common one.
Stefano’s notion of an ‘archive’. The principal archive is the body. The writing should be a reflection of that.
The importance of verbs: to play, to move, to re-member, to fight, to re-energize, to write, to re-write, to repeat, to surprise, to hesitate, to stutter, to be silent, to be floored, …
The floor, the earth as one important pole of the vertical axis of our knowledge – to keep the knowledge grounded in embodied experience. With the other pool being the sky, the air which you can look up at, listen to, sense it touching you. It whispers the yet unknown, the not yet articulated, that what you wish to experience, intuitively.
The importance of pauses, of rereading, of copying like a scribe.
We started the week with finding ways to orientate ourselves through the senses, through our perception, but also sometimes with eyes closed, inside this space, finding the connections between inside and outside, opening doors, looking out of windows.
Narratives always arise from the body; are very close to it. A pair of green socks weaving a common cable motive between Italy, Canada and Belgium.
The importance of sounds. It is hard, almost impossibly to remember a particular sound, the voice of a loved one, but the other way around, a sound brings back instantly the memory attached to it: me sleeping against the wall, playing with the sound of bells, the video Lin posted on Facebook earlier this week, me ringing the bells as an altar boy,…
The noise of the heating system no longer bothering me, being part of the experience, the space.
The air is moving a sheet with fingerprints someone left behind in the yellow. Repetition and surprise. The pleasure of discovering something for the first time like the imprints of the word ‘alarm’ on the fire door. Triggering of the memories of all the other fire doors we played with, especially the one in London which instantly summoned a guard.
A wall can be very reassuring. But I prefer to play with doors. Always looking for the edges, for what can be peeled off.
We all do have strategies we return to; to understand ourselves, to communicate with the others, to lose ourselves and to find ourselves.
The body as cross.
The notion of revealing and unveiling. Stefano turning the pages he just wrote on, upside down and reading what Lin has just written. Me covering Lin’s drawings of my body with a blanket. Lin lying and covering her drawings with her whole body.
What remains. What dissolves.
I collect stories like stamps, loosening them in water and drying them on old newspapers.
Stefano’s powerful comment on the importance of incertitude. (Again)
My body as palimpsest to cover things up, to unwrap. To let the words dance on the paper. To create chaos. To allow fragments to come back. To have a strong desire for silence, for things to end. To walk the labyrinth. To document. To pay attention to detail. To question.
 
Guy Cools